Inside Out 2 review: An emotional support movie for those who still have faith in Pixar

When it comes to sequels, Pixar’s track record has been mixed, to say the least. At the upper end of the quality scale there’s Toy Story 2, not only one of the best sequels to come from Pixar, but one of the best sequels ever made. Following closely behind it is Toy Story 3, completing an impeccable trilogy that probably should have stayed a trilogy. Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum we have Cars 2, a tedious, lackluster retread that fundamentally misunderstood what people liked about the first one. Although it was financially successful, Cars 2 signaled the lowering of standards that would eventually lead to Pixar’s creative decline. It didn’t happen all at once, though. There were a few films released in the subsequent years that still had evidence of the old spark, like 2015's Inside Out, a fun and—there’s no other way to say it—emotional story set mostly inside the head of an 11-year-old girl named Riley.

It makes sense that Pixar would go back to the well that yielded $858 million at the box office and an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. And so here we are, a decade later, revisiting Riley and her emotions in Inside Out 2. Compared to other Pixar sequels, it lands somewhere in the middle of the pack, but closer to the higher aspirations of Toy Story than the superficiality of Cars. Inside Out 2 has a lot going for it right out of the gate that other sequels don’t. It doesn’t have to work hard to justify its existence and it doesn’t have to undo any of the progress or character development from the original. It works because Inside Out left room to grow. Throughout the first film we saw Riley’s childhood constructs being torn down to make way for more adolescent preoccupations, but that transition wasn’t completed by the end of the film. It concludes with the arrival of a new, expanded console, sporting a giant red button marked “puberty” and Joy ominously observing, “After all, Riley’s 12 now. What could happen?” The purpose of Inside Out 2 is to answer that question, to complete her coming-of-age arc.

We pick up the story a year later, with Riley (Kensington Tallman, replacing Kaitlyn Dias) and the emotions in her headspace—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader), and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling)—settling into teenagehood. Riley has fully acclimated to life in San Francisco. She plays on a hockey team with her two best friends, Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu). She’s a good student and gets along with her supportive parents. Her identity is starting to coalesce through a new mental process called the Belief System. Whenever Joy (or any other character) inputs a core memory into the system, a new belief forms. A memory of her helping out a classmate might result in a belief like “I am a good friend.” All of those beliefs entwine with each other to form Riley’s Sense of Self. Naturally, Joy has assumed sole responsibility for its construction and she’s very selective about what memories go into it.

Although Joy now understands the importance of Sadness and all the other emotions and happily lets them take their turns at the console, she still has a lot to learn when it comes to seeing the full picture of Riley’s mental health. Just when everything seems to be humming along nicely, the puberty alarm goes off and a handful of new, more complex emotions come barging in. Joining the original five in Headquarters are Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Anxiety takes control almost immediately, obsessively projecting every possible future scenario and trying to prevent the worst from happening. When Joy gets in the way she literally bottles her up with the rest of the basic emotions and sends them off to the vault where Riley keeps her deepest, darkest secrets.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, Riley is invited to attend a hockey training camp with the local high school team. She desperately wants to fit in with the older, cooler girls, especially Val (Lilimar), the team captain, whom she idolizes. Riley learns that if she does well enough at this camp she has a chance to make it onto the varsity team her freshman year. That’s when Anxiety really steps up. It would be easy to set Anxiety up as a villain in this story. We have a connection to the original emotions, so when she mistreats them we feel indignant on their behalf. But the film takes a more nuanced approach. Anyone who’s ever experienced some form of anxiety (in other words, basically everyone) can understand where she’s coming from. She sincerely believes she’s trying to protect Riley, even if her methods are questionable and her reasoning flawed. If the lesson of the first film was that every emotion serves a necessary function, this one expands that idea of acceptance to encompass all the unpleasant parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore.

The screenplay is credited to Meg LeFauve, who co-wrote the original, along with Dave Holstein. In keeping with the spirit of Inside Out, Inside Out 2 is filled with humorous little puns and visual gags as the emotions traverse Riley’s mindscape—like a giant “sar-chasm” that opens up when Riley starts using sarcasm as a defense mechanism (anything said across it echoes back in a sarcastic tone), or a torrential downpour of lightbulbs during a “brainstorm” session. There are also a few wry digs at Disney cartoons and the grueling process of animation. The story moves along at a brisk pace, covering a lot of ground in its 90-minute runtime, but it hits all the beats it needs to hit and never feels rushed.

First-time feature director Kelsey Mann, a Pixar veteran since 2013, takes over here for Inside Out writer-director Pete Docter, who’s a little busy now serving as chief creative officer of Pixar. It was Docter who came up with the concept for the original film after observing his own daughter and wondering about her inner life. Mann, who is also a father, does a fine job keeping things light and lively. It’s when the scenes need to go deeper that he falls a little short. You want to connect to these characters on a deeper level, but it never really lets you get fully invested in them. It’s hard to imagine anything as moving as the scenes with Bing Bong in the first film fitting into this one. Maybe something was lost in the transition from tween to teen protagonist.

The new characters and their voice actors, particularly Hawke as Anxiety, bring some much needed energy to the Headquarters scenes, while Poehler and the other veterans coast on cruise control. The additions make narrative sense, but in real life there’s more to puberty than the emergence of new, mostly negative, feelings. To deal with it in an authentic way, though, would be opening up a can of worms that Disney and Pixar would clearly rather avoid. Are Riley’s feelings toward Val anything more than platonic? The film doesn’t bother to tell us. If you squint you can see whatever you want to see there, but it would be nice if Pixar showed a little courage instead of baiting the audience and trying to have it both ways.

All told, that Inside Out 2 looks and feels a lot like an old-school Pixar film works both for and against it. It’s a faithful continuation of the world from the first film, but that world was built 10 years ago. With every other animation studio trying to be Pixar now, that style of CG animation no longer stands out. Pixar desperately needs to innovate, but if the studio is determined to rely on its existing IP for the foreseeable future (and it sure seems like it is), this isn’t the worst way to go about it. Sometimes you want a comfort watch, and Inside Out 2 is perfectly suited for that. Just don’t expect all those emotions to hit the same way they did the first time around.